On 'UTOPIA NOW!,' Rosie Tucker Asks How We Can Escape the Capitalist Machine
I was also reading a lot of sci-fi when I wrote this album, which especially during the time of COVID lockdown, felt like a way of engaging with the dysfunction of the present moment. I could talk for hours about watching a lot of movies and listening to music and learning how to engage with art in a very pure way again.
Why do you feel like you had to learn how to engage with art again?
I think that because my primary way of listening to music has, for the past 10 years, been streaming. The platforms that offer that service have increasingly come to resemble social media, in their emphasis on metrics and on relationships to other artists — which, by the way, are not set up by the artists themselves.
These applications have a number attached to everything, and that has become a huge part of the experience of being a working artist. Metrics are everywhere: have more or fewer people clicked on your link in bio this week? Are more or fewer people listening to you this month? What about this hour? I do not abide by the idea that it is meaningful that I have more or fewer monthly listeners than another person, because ultimately, it's informed by an industry and a market. And I don't trust the market to show me the best of anything at all. It took some time for me to learn how to be a listener and a fan, again, after learning how some of these things worked.
Yeah, I feel like the collective is starting to turn on the Spotify algorithm because people are starting to realize that it's always recommending the same three things to you, depending on what you listen to, and people are starting to get a little bored with that.
If you go and look at what Spotify thinks fans of my music should be listening to, it's going to be other white thin assigned female at birth people holding guitars. And that doesn't mean that something in that formation can't be incredibly moving. But the flip side of that is just noticing how, oopsies, we're kind of categorizing musicians by race on some of these playlists!
When what’s being promoted is white, and generally cis people, we have a right to say that that's not the vibe, that's not what we want. That's not the world that I function in, and that's not how my life has ever looked. I think it’s good to recognize that these applications are driven by algorithms, and they will reproduce what many of the most wealthy and powerful people in the country find to be palatable or enjoyable. And so you're gonna end up with something racist, and we have to actively work against that — because an algorithm is not going to actively work against that.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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